One of this year’s projects is replenishing my stump sock supply, which I had allowed to get painfully* threadbare. My procrastination was only partially caused by economics – I literally didn’t know where to go for new ones. My entire experience with prosthetic supplies has involved finding a brick-and-mortar Hanger Prosthetics outlet and saying, “I needa.” And then they told me what the new restrictions were, and I did the minimum necessary to scrape past them. For example, in California I could only get a replacement foot with a doctor’s prescription, so I had to go find a doctor – any doctor – cross his palm with silver and get him to agree that I did indeed have a prosthetic leg which might indeed need a replacement foot from time to time. A plumber or a fry cook could have made the same observation with exactly the same level of expertise, but we mustn’t question the law.
Anyway, I’m a helluva long way from the nearest Hanger Prosthetics outlet and I don’t easily travel, but it seemed straightforward enough: I asked Landlady to do it for me. And she agreed, and they turned her away! No, there was no law involved – it just seems Hanger finds it a lot less profitable to sell somebody a stack of socks than to extort a consultation and examination fee first.
Landlady, being far more in the computer age than me, did something that never occurred to me – probably took her about fifteen seconds: She went on line and searched for a website that sold prosthetic supplies. Had no trouble finding one, and telling me about it, and now that’s where I take my business. They’ll sell me all the stump socks I want, at relatively reasonable cost and with no hassle at all aside from those normally imposed by my peculiar maildrop arrangement.
There’s only one catch: I do get prosthetics-related spam now. Some of it tries to sell me products that – even after more than 45 years – I still find a little bizarre. A good friend once asked me to put my shoes on, because “No offense, but it’s like talking to half a mannequin.” It seems that these days retailers want to turn me into half a terminator.
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*and I do mean literally painful. When the toe of your stumpsock is down to the threads it tends to engrave a sort of waffle pattern into the point of your stump, a sensation I leave to your imagination.
‘…it tends to engrave a sort of waffle pattern…”
Something akin to what kneeling in threadbare long-johns for hours on end would be like?
Been there…done that…not fun.
Kind of like that, yeah…
I saw a dude at Kroger yesterday with an artificial leg, same side my injury was on; his meat leg even ended at about the point where they wanted to take mine off. I was a little annoyed at first, because he walks a lot better than I do, but then I thought “Well, fuck it, good on ‘im, he gets around well. I’m glad for him”.
Of course, I imagine they could adjust his prosthetic to get the length right. They put my femur back together an inch shorter than it had been. I haven’t found a way to extend body parts (although many have made lots of money claiming to have a method to do just that). I’d like to not list with every right step, but I prefer feeling the ground through both soles.
Tennessee Budd.
There’s a way to do it. Seriously. First, they break your leg. No. Really. Then they drill rods into the bones on either side of the break, and attach an external fixator with screw joints to the rods.
Every day or so, you then get the joy of screwing the joints on the fixator a certain number of partial or full turns in order to make the broken joint expand ever so slightly. Ever sooooo slightly.
Months of this torture can actually extend the length of your main bones by up to an inch.
Quicker work can be done by doing the same thing, except actually placing an artificial or doner bone segment or segments between your broken bone. And then doing the exact same painfully torturous thing with the external fixator.
Or… you can enjoy your leg the way it is. Know lots of people who prefer being lopsided than to go through the torture as described above.
(My wife got the esteemed joy of being one of the experiments for the external fixators when some jerk decided to crush the engine block of her nice motorcycle through her leg. Huge external fixator, the pieces parts of her leg finally healed in a roughly bone-shaped shape. And then the doctor found that the rods that went into the bone for the fixator to attach to must be removed under general anesthesia rather than without even a local and definitely not in his office.
And she still sometimes wonders if it would have been easier for them to have just lopped it off, rather than dealing with the loss of muscle, joint agility and strength and all the other fun things of dealing with an aging, severely damaged limb. Six of one, half dozen of another type of things, you know?)
First, we couldn’t buy cough syrup. Then we couldn’t buy ammo. Now, we can’t buy SOCKS. WTH?
But we can’t get a neoprene glove with a velcro strap on it….
Joel, at least you’re mechanically inclined and can do some prosthetic repairs yourself.
I suspect the reason I haven’t been fired long ago is that I was able to fix a power wheelchair this morning (took 3 minutes) without the State’s Knowledge or Permission and the client got to cancel the expensive fix-it appointment.
Yep, what Andrew said: https://paleyinstitute.org/centers-of-excellence/limb-lengthening/
I am a veritable encyclopedia of weird stuff. It’s my special talent. Very useful for clearing out a room. Wanna know about onion soup as a medical tool?
Similar experience when I tried to “buy local!” to get a new hose and mask for a CPAP. Wouldn’t talk to me without a doctor’s note, which would’ve required another $1,500 “sleep study.” (Obvious conclusion: “Wow — you snore a lot! You need a CPAP. Who’s your insurance company?” It would make a snake oil salesman green with envy).
Hello, Amazon.